As consumers, we take NAND flash memory for granted. It has worked its way into a vast array of products. These include USB drives, SD cards, wearables, IoT devices, tablets, phones and increasingly SSD’s for computer systems. From the outside the magic of flash memory seems quite simple, but we have to remember that this is a technology… Read More
In a power hungry world of semiconductor devices, multiple ways are being devised to budget power from system to transistor level. The success of IoT (Internet of Things) Edge devices specifically depend on lowest power, lowest area, optimal performance, and lowest cost. These devices need to be highly energy efficient for sustained… Read More
In 1992, when Samsungbecame the largest producer of memory chips, it was not in top10 list of semiconductor companies. It was ranked at #11. Since then it has strived to attain higher ranks in the top10 list. In around 2000, it climbed to the ranks of top5 and then since 2002 until now it is at #2 in the worldwide semiconductor sales which… Read More
Privacy is a tough enough question when using a device – but what about when we’re done with it? In a world of two year service agreements with device upgrades and things being attached to long-life property like cars and homes, your data could fall into the hands of the next owner way too easily.
“Oh, it’s OK, I wiped the phone with a factory… Read More
Non Volatile Memory (NVM) is a superb technology, at least if you appreciate the physical law behind: storing a data in an embedded location with no physical link, as you charge a cell by influence and read it without physically accessing the stored data. Although the semiconductor industry is building NVM IC for about 30 years now,… Read More
I went to some of the JEDEC mobile conference a couple of weeks ago. The opening keynote was by Richard Wietfeld of Qualcomm called The Need for Speed.
He emphasized that smartphones are really setting the pace these days in all things mobile and internet. Over 1/3 of access is on smartphones now. Over 4/5 of searches on smartphones… Read More
In doing some digging in preparation for the start of www.ReRAM-Forum.com Christie Marrian asks if ReRAM.CBRAM technology is approaching a ‘tipping point’ relative to NAND Flash. You can read more of his analysis over at the blog he moderates (ReRAM-Forum.com). Also a note to readers. The blog is interested in collecting new … Read More
Back in the early days of ASIC when we had just two and then (wow!) three layers of metal, place and route was done by putting the standard cells in rows with gaps between them and then using a specialized router to do the interconnection. It would use one layer of metal horizontally and one vertically and avoid jogs. This was called a … Read More
There has been a general trend for over a decade now towards the use of very fast serial interfaces instead of wide parallel interfaces. This has been driven by a number of different factors ranging from the lack of pins on an SoC, the difficulty of keeping wide parallel interfaces free of skew, limitations on printed circuit board… Read More
In an interview that Gordon Moore gave in early 2000, the former co-founder of Intel recounted how they abandoned the DRAM market in the early 1980s in order to exit the increasingly unprofitable business and focus on the promising, yet still young x86 processor market. Intel was also home to EEPROM and NOR Flash, two memory technologies… Read More
